@davidemery: Fake Hits

One of the internet’s core strengths is its ability to create communities on a scale that were never possible before. People from around the world can loosely group together around a topic remarkably easily. What used to be a niche interest can suddenly be shared with millions of other people.

This has obviously had something of an impact on the music industry….

These “fake hits” are fascinating because they are hits. They have millions upon millions of streams, coming from a huge global audience. And those streams equal a very significant revenue stream. For example, if you get on “Today’s Top Hits”, the biggest playlist on Spotify, you can expect to get at least a couple of hundred thousand streams a day – more if you’re near the top of the playlist – and that adds up to a decent amount of money if you do the math. From one playlist, on one platform.

But they’re still fake. Outside of the bubble, there seems to be very little resonance or connection. You can’t sell out shows based on big streaming numbers alone. These numbers represent attention and revenue, which is great, but the engagement is transitory, at least to the scale that the numbers would suggest. They’re the start of a fan’s journey with an artist rather then the end. The fans listening to tracks on Today’s Top Hits are listening to exactly that – they’re listening to the playlist, not the tracks. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this – in fact, quite the opposite, it’s an amazingly powerful new mode of music discovery. Where things come unstuck is where this new pattern of engagement – curation bubbles and echo chambers – slams into the traditional record industry.